The atmosphere and sound design are spot on. But the human AI is buggy and terrible, resulting in some forced reloads because they were always in attack mode, shooting at me from very far away even though they didn't have line of sight and I was nowhere near them. There were other times they would just stand around and stare in my general direction, not moving or reacting for . . reasons. The alien AI also sucks because it ALWAYS knows where you are! It basically circles around you, getting clues to where you are but never your exact spot. The first couple of times getting caught can be scary. But after that, the game just becomes frustrating and a waste of time since coming out of cover always seems like a gamble.
If I were to sum this game up in one word, it would be "exhausting". This game is great for people who remember the original. But for anyone new, I'd stay away. The updated visuals and music are great! The animations make you feel like you're playing in a pop up book which adds to the charm. But the game design and conveyance is extremely outdated and have no place in modern gaming. You'll spend the majority of your time getting stuck and either backtracking while trying everything or looking up solutions online and wondering how you would have figured the issue out logically. Either of which are not fun. There are also many ways to softlock your adventure, forcing you to restart from an earlier save or from the very beginning. This was fine back in the NES days since game design was still new and companies were trying to find ways to extend playtime with limited memory capacity. But in this day and age, it just doesn't work. Overall, I had a better time looking at the art book and wallpapers that came with the special edition than playing this.
This game was great! . . Then I started experiencing bugs such as mouse movement and keyboard inputs randomly freezing for no reason, forcing me to restart the game (sometimes several times) until things work again. Then I found a bug with the shotgun not working after I fire the alt ability. But the final straw was the boss fight in episode 2. I'm no god gamer but I'm also not apposed to difficulty spikes. I'm not even bothered by a boss with 4 phases to get through. But when quicksaving doesn't work and the boss can one shot you any time she pleases on top of dragging the fight out longer with two waves of enemies (one including lots of bullet spongy enemies), it turns into a waste of my time.
Not a bad game but not a great game either. Needs more quality of life improvements such as telling you how many runes (The things you need to collect to unlock weapons and augments) are in a level while in the level. Gun play is ok. But in tight places, it can be hard to see when there is a lot of blood FX in your face which gives enemies free shots at you.
As the title says, this could have been the best! The story, soundtrack, graphics, just about everything is fantastic! . . But the bugs and problems were just too many. From simple things like textures not loading to more serious things like softlocks, boss fight issues, and falling through the map just killed any immersion especially when issues happened at the end of the game. Another real shame is that I know CDPR will fix this eventually but a little too late here since GOG doesn't let people edit their reviews (unless they change that policy later). 2020's last middle finger.
